Setup for the Icom 756 Pro III

Using Ham Radio Deluxe with the Pro III

Ham Radio Deluxe (HRD) is a wonderful program that can control almost every function of most transceivers, especially the Icom Pro series. The program was developed by Simon Brown HB9DRV and maintained and tested by the late Peter Halpin PH1PH. 

The program is absolutely free of charge and in fact Simon is quite forceful on his intentions to provide this program with no charge to it's users.  That is very admirable considering the great sophistication and complexity of the package.  Some of the features of the package include of course complete rig control, a great logging program, PSK31 remote DX node cluster, remote server so that your station can be controlled from your vacation home etc., and a Mapper program that has gray line and points on the globe you have worked others. There are other features, but you can go to the HRD page and see for yourself without me giving and exhaustive list.  Here is a link to the HRD home page where the package can be downloaded. Ham Radio Deluxe

You must provide an interface between your computer and your transceiver. There are several out there like the Icom CT-17. A quick search of e-Ham product reviews under rig interfaces will yield several. After you download the program and install it on your computer system, bring it up and when the screen asks you to choose a radio, chose one of the DEMO-MATIC rigs, just to get an idea as to how the program works. After you have played with it for a couple of days then start the program and select a new transceiver. In my case the Icom Pro III. 

You must provide several parameters so that HRD can control your rig. Make sure that the baud rate is 19200, and the address is 6E. The rest of the parameters are pretty much obvious. Now in order for the rig to start communication with the computer, you must set some parameters in the Pro III. Find the SET MENU by pressing the EXIT/SET button for a second or two. Select OTHER and look for the parameters that effect the CI-V interface. Please set the parameters as follows:

CI-V Baud Rate = 19200

CI-V Address = 6Eh

CI-V Transceiver = ON

CI-V with IC-731 = ON

That's about all you have to do. The radio should start responding to the commands of the computer. Below is a  screen shot of what the control screen looks like.

I hope you can see it well enough to understand what I am trying to point out to you. On the top in the middle you see the frequency. In this case 14.178.000. You can click on any number and a bar on top and a bar on the bottom will appear over and under the number you clicked on. By clicking on the top bar the frequency number will go up, and conversely, clicking on the bottom bar will cause it to go down. This is just one of the many ways you can change frequency. 

Look at the horizontal bars going across the screen. By placing your mouse pointer on the little rectangle, you can drag the slider across the screen and change frequencies that way. One of the sliders in this example is set up for fine tuning and the other one below it is for course tuning. You see the numbers under the top slider, 160, 80, 40 etc. obviously, these buttons are for changing bands. Just a click and you are there. There is also a frequency menu under TOOLS where you can directly enter a frequency you want to go to. 

There are buttons to the left and right of the main frequency indicator. These buttons are hard to see in this picture, but they control main functions of the transceiver, like going in and out of Duel Watch, putting on the Noise Blanker. controlling the Filter selection and many more. Just click on them and watch what the rig does. Some have a pull down selection when you click on them. There are other sliders at the bottom of the screen that control other functions of the rig. They are easy to understand once you play with them a little. 

The example above is in full screen mode but I usually only fill half the screen with HRD and run some other application in the second half of the screen. By running your mouse over the menu selections, you will see a help to tell you what the selection does when you click on it. All in all, the program is very intuitive. Playing with it for a day or two, will be enough to make you fall in love with it. Several features like the logger program and DX cluster program did not seem to good or useful to my way of operating and I was using other programs to do those functions. But after using them for a time, I found that they were indeed better than what I was using and I have stopped using the other programs and now use HRD exclusively.

Note: See on the display of HRD above I have the PowerMaster control and computer readout screen started and I move it into the HRD area so everything that I need to control my station is right in front of me.

Using Griffin Technology tuning knob with the Pro III

One device that makes using HRD so much fun, is the Griffin Technology tuning knob. A quick check on Google will yield the web site for you. Below is another picture of the device so you can kind of see what it looks like.

I wanted to show you what it looks like and the neat blue glow that is on the bottom of the knob. It can even be set to pulsate at just about any rate you desire. COOOOOOLLLLL. Setting up and installing the knob has been a little difficult for some. 

First, after you get the knob, you must put it in a spare USB port on your computer. Before doing that though, please go to their web site and download the current manual. Strangely they do not provide on in the package. Only the knob and software. If you have Windows and especially XP, the system will put a Human Interface Device out there for you, and the light on the knob should turn on. But you are far from done. Put the software in the CD ROM drive, and it should start. If not look for the program on the CD and click on it. The package will start to install on your system with a Wizard. Us wizards are cool aren't we? If you have the new Windows Vista be sure and download the new Vista drivers off of the Griffin web page. If you didn't get the CD with the knob you can get the control software there as well. After you have installed the control software you will get a screen that looks like this:

Ham Radio Deluxe HRD will not be listed for control until you click on Applications and ADD it to the applications list. Highlight HRD and click on Type. A drop down menu will appear. Select for the first action that shows the knob going clockwise "Scrolls UP". Click on Type again and select from the drop down menu next to the view of the knob going counter clockwise and select "Scrolls Down" that is about all you have to do. You can control how the knob acts like pulsating and the speed of the knob in the configuration settings that can be found under the heading PowerMates.

Looking at the screen above will show you some of the options. That really is about all there is to knob. When you use it just position the curser over whatever part of the frequency you want the knob to control and it will go up or down depending on which way you turn the knob. Just like your VFO but you select how coarse or fine you want to tune by selecting what part of the total frequency you have the curser on.

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